The 1946 London course was the first training course given in Europe by Maria Montessori when she and her son Mario returned from seven years of exile in India during World War II. In these 1946 Lectures, six years before her death, the reader can sense that Montessori has travelled the world and has observed, profoundly and scientifically, an immense amount of children. In these lectures, taken down in English by one of her assistants, Maria Montessori speaks with the mature wisdom of a lifetime spent studying, not just early childhood, but human development as a whole: infancy, the elementary-school years and adolescence. The typescript of this course was to have significant pedagogical consequences, since The 1946 Lectures became the foundation of AMI’s 3-6 courses.